Competing definitions of justice in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics indicate the existence of two distinct economic systems with different normative priorities. The three-class society of the Platonic economy (guardians, auxiliaries, producers) gives rise to guardians who by virtue are...

The roaring (twenty-)twenties are a decade of anniversaries and milestones. 2020 was the 100th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s seminal article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and the 75th anniversary of F.A. Hayek’s seminal article “The Use of Knowledge in...

We develop a simple model to analyse the 'dual-track' approach to transition to a market economy as a mechanism for implementing efficient Pareto-improving economic reform, that is, reform achieving efficiency without creating losers. The approach, based on the continued enforcement of the...

Ludwig von Mises was one of the greatest economists and political scientists of the twentieth century. He revolutionized the understanding of money, inflation and recessions; comprehensively refuted the arguments for socialism; and provided a devastating critique of the methodologies of...

The Italian contribution to the Socialist Economic Calculation Debate (SECD) cannot be limited to the important and fundamental works by Pareto and Barone. In fact, if their contributions are still ambiguous and we have to wait for the Mises' paper in 1920 in order to get the needed...

Beyond private ownership of the means of production, what is the most important, or essential, fact of capitalism? Friedrich A. Hayek thought it was the economy of knowledge with which the system operated, whereas for Joseph A. Schumpeter it was the process of creative destruction. To our...

In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F.A. Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...